PAY IT FORWARD BOARD

What Is It?

The Pay It Forward Board is a simple visual invitation to spread kindness in your community.
Simply purchase a Pay It Forward menu item and receive a magnetic token to place on the board.
Anyone can take one — and anyone can leave one.

How It Works

1. If you're feeling generous, leave a token — it symbolizes more than just a free menu item, it represents a genuine act of kindness.
2. If you’re in need of a little kindness, take one. No judgment. No explanation needed.
3. That’s it. Pass it on.

Why Pay It Forward?

This project was born from a desire to make kindness a little more tangible. In a busy world, it’s easy to forget that we all get by with a little help from our friends — and strangers. These boards are meant to be soft little nudges to remember that.

The Backstory

While the idea of a pay-it-forward board is not unique, my reason for taking this project on so passionately is deeply personal.

During COVID, I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly out of work. Having not been an avid saver (let this also serve as a lesson to you regarding the importance of having a nest egg), I found myself homeless very shortly after. It was an eye-opening experience to see the world from a perspective often hidden from most.

My most vivid memory of this time is the first time I asked for a handout (a first for me and a last). After much inner turmoil, I had finally worked up the courage to ask a local restaurant if they might have a food item available to spare. Their lobby was open for pickup only (oh, the joys of COVID), and I thought this was a safer space to make the request rather than doing it out in the open through a drive-thru window. It was important for me that they understood I wasn’t asking them to go to any trouble, and so I phrased my request carefully:

“Do you have any items that were sent back or perhaps never picked up? I’m homeless and haven’t eaten in a few days.”

The young lady behind the counter’s face curled — not into a look of sympathy or even pity, which I would have understood. Instead, the look portrayed was one of disgust as she said, “No. We don’t do that here.”

Now, I’m not an emotional person. I don’t take pride in that — it’s just the truth. I maybe cry once every two or three years, if that. But as my hand reached for the door to make a hasty escape from this poor young woman — who’d obviously had some kind of trauma relating to homeless people in the past — I couldn’t hold them back. The tears came pouring out of me like I was five years old again. For the first time in my adult life, another human looked at me and saw not a fellow human, but something disgusting. It broke me. And because of this, I never asked for anything else that I didn’t feel I had earned.

That memory has stuck with me. I can never go back to a time before I was “disgusting” to another human being.

So when a friend of mine (Jay — that’s you, buddy) mentioned seeing a pay-it-forward board at a local brewery where he was visiting, I was held captive by the idea. If something like this had existed where I was way back when, I could have saved myself one of the hardest emotional experiences of my life.

Most people don’t see it, but there’s an underlying genius to the approach. It removes any need for awkwardness — there either are pay-it-forward items available, or there aren’t, and it’s instantly knowable visually. It wraps all of this functionality in a format that can be easily customized to be aesthetically pleasing so that it doubles as décor or art for the business.

What makes our board unique is the magnetic blackboard base (most are cork boards or hooks with hanging cups), the magnets (custom-made to fit into the business’s aesthetic), and the “art” (if you can call it that). My friend Jay also had the perfect tagline for our new board: